Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Nobody in the United States can probably ever again stand up to China: now that the Chinese virtually own America and the Obama Administration will add to what China owns and the money U.S. taxpayers give to China in debt and interest payments….

So today President Obama Himself added to Google’s world wide luster by using Google’s “Moderator” for his Internet on line town hall meeting.

Google should be ashamed, though, of how it has knuckled under to Chinese pressure and how Google refuses to admit that it is aiding and abetting China’s miserable and barbaric acts of human rights abuses….

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is an Obama buddy….

So the President of the United States can use Google to get his message out and when Tibetan protesters put a video on Google’s YouTube to get their message out and China blocks YouTube: the American media is silent….

China pulled the plug on YouTube: cutting off 300 million Chinese viewers.

The issue is one of free speech and international access.

But it is also about censorship and control. A video of Chinese police beating a Tibetan protester to death is at the heart of China’s new action.

Most U.S. media have only reported that China pulled the YouTube plug. Nothing more.

That is a crime on top of a crime — so as not to rile China we suspect.

This allows China to restrict freedom of speech and to violate norms of human rights everywhere else….

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BBC

China’s move to block YouTube has been criticised by a leading advocacy group that promotes constitutional liberties in the digital age.

The Centre for Democracy and Technology told the BBC: “China’s actions fail to live up to international norms.”

The video sharing site has been off limits in China since Monday.

“China’s apparent blocking of YouTube is at odds with the rule of law and the right to freedom of expression,” said CDT president Leslie Harris.

“Anytime a country limits or takes down content online , it must be forthright and specific about its actions and do so only in narrowly defined circumstances consistent with international human rights and the rule of law,” stated Ms Harris.

Google, which owns YouTube, told the BBC that it had no idea why the Chinese government had taken this action.

“We don’t know the reason for the block and are working to restore access to users in China as quickly as possible,” said spokesperson Scott Rubin.

Tibet

Earlier in the week, the BBC reported from Beijing that China cut off access to the website because it carried a video showing soldiers beating monks and other Tibetans.

The graphic video was released by Tibetan exiles and showed hundreds of uniformed Chinese troops swarming through a Tibetan monastery. It included footage of a group of troops beating a man with batons.

A video that appears to show police fatally beating a Tibetan protester was a fake concocted by supporters of the Dalai Lama, China said Tuesday — the same day the video-sharing network YouTube said its service had been blocked in China.

AP

The video has been posted on YouTube in recent days.

A spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, said he couldn’t comment on the Chinese government‘s reason for the block.

“We are looking into it and working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible,” spokesman Scott Rubin said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Here’s part of the New York Times’ report:
“The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,” said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of China Digital Times, a news Web site that chronicles political and economic changes in China.

Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fits in with an apparent effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube, which also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests, whose 20th anniversary is coming up, and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable, is being targeted.

In this Tuesday March 10, 2009, file photo, Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, speaks to the media on the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule that sent him into exile, in Dharmsala, India. The South African government said Tuesday, March 24, 2009, that the Dalai Lama is not welcome until after the 2010 football World Cup, for fear tensions over Tibet would overshadow all other issues. Organizers said earlier that a peace conference scheduled in Johannesburg on Friday has been indefinitely postponed because the government had barred attendance by the Tibetan leader, who has clashed with China. Tibet’s government-in-exile said South Africa was acting under pressure from China, but South Africa’s government denied it. South Africa is China’s largest African trading partner.(AP Photo/Ashwini Bhatia/file)

China has extended a crackdown on electronic porn to the country’s mobile phones, after shutting down 1,250 websites because of their explicit content, the official Xinhua agency said Wednesday.

“We will incorporate ‘lewd’ messages spread via mobile phones into the crackdown,” the report quoted a joint notice from the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Culture and five other government offices saying.

China promised last week that the campaign, which was launched in early January, will be no “flash in the pan.”

Over 40 people have been detained for disseminating porn on the Internet, and over 3 million “items of online information” have been deleted, the report said.

Google, Baidu and other major websites have also been given a public dressing down for not being quick enough to wipe out targeted content, and outspoken blogging portals shut down for posting “politically harmful information.”

The Internet crackdown has been described by analysts as another step in the Communist Party‘s battle to stifle dissent in a year of sensitive anniversaries, including the 20th anniversary of the government’s bloody crackdown on the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

Tiananmen Square in 1989.

(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani for Reuters)

The government of China has recently launched a major crackdown on Internet sites and search engines that it does not condone.

China says it “decided to launch a nationwide campaign to clean up a vulgar current on the Internet and named and exposed a large number of violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth and young people.”

But China has, in the past, revoked the rights of Internet providers to serve the public in China, or has restricted content, for politicial reasons often seen as a violation of free speech.

Activists say China and Vietnam, in particular, hide corruption, human rights abuses and pro-democracy information from the public — using anti-porn as a justification. These actvisits say the government actions are blatant censorship and violations of free speech.

In the recent crackdown in China, Google, MSN, Baidu and dozens of search engines and providers were forced to delete content and apologize to the Chinese government.

The action comes in a year of social turmoil due to the economy, mass migration of the unemployed, fear of economic unrest and several anniversaries that may spark unrest within China.

This is the 20th year since the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Analysts see this year as a potential trouble point for China’s Communist government.

But Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, an assistant professor of journalism at Hong Kong University, a former CNN correspondent and an observer of China and the Internet, recently discussed with CNN the move by Beijing. She believes the Internet trend in China is part of a larger global move….

China on Friday expanded its Internet cleanup campaign, which had ostensibly been aimed at cracking down on pornography, to shut down a blog-hosting site popular with activists, www.bullog.cn. The site’s founder, Luo Yonghao, said he was notified by the Beijing Communications Administration that the site “contained harmful comments on current affairs and therefore will be closed.”

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Tim Johnson of the McClatchy Newspapers reported on this on January 9, 2009:

For one thing, the internet is abuzz with postings and photos of young Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi cavorting on a beach in the Caribbean with her fiancé. (Sorry, I’ll offer no links, just the photo you see of her here.) China Daily this morning calls the hubbub over the photos “an instant online carnival of voyeurism.”

Zhang, who was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was voted China’s most beautiful actress last month.

Other nations have also taken actions against a totally free Internet recently. The Associated Press reported on December 27, 2008:

A proposed Internet filter dubbed the “Great Aussie Firewall” is promising to make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries.

Consumers, civil-rights activists, engineers, Internet providers and politicians from opposition parties are among the critics of a mandatory Internet filter that would block at least 1,300 Web sites prohibited by the government — mostly child pornography, excessive violence, instructions in crime or drug use and advocacy of terrorism.

Hundreds protested in state capitals earlier this month.

“This is obviously censorship,” said Justin Pearson Smith, 29, organizer of protests in Melbourne and an officer of one of a dozen Facebook groups against the filter.

Vietnam has for a long time tried to rein in the Internet and bloggers. On December 24, The Associated Press reported:

Vietnam has approved new regulations banning bloggers from discussing subjects the government deems sensitive or inappropriate and requiring them to limit their writings to personal issues.

The rules ban any posts that undermine national security, incite violence or crime, disclose state secrets, or include inaccurate information that could damage the reputation of individuals and organizations, according to a copy of the regulations obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

China has widened an Internet crackdown on “vulgar” content to target 14 new sites, including Microsoft’s MSN, and chided fellow American giant Google for not doing enough to clean up.

China’s ruling Communist Party is wary of threats to its grip on information and has conducted numerous censorship efforts targeting pornography, political criticism and web scams, but officials flagged tougher steps this time.

Reuters

MSN was cited for the large amount of inappropriate images on its film channel and some “selected pictures” in its social messaging section on a list posted on the website of the government-supported China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center (http://ciirc.china.cn).

Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment.

The campaign coincides with efforts to stifle dissent and protest as the economy slows and China enters a year of sensitive anniversaries — particularly the 20th year since the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Google and other major Internet sites apologised on Wednesday after the Chinese government accused them of failing to police links on their web pages that could lead to pornographic material.
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Google said it had deleted all links to vulgar material from its search indexes, “which may have had a negative effect on web users”, in an apology posted in the company blog on its Chinese site.

“Search engines link to a sea of materials and our plan is to conquer mountains of technical difficulties and do all we can to reduce the amount of vulgar material,” Google said in the statement.

“Google is willing to be a law-abiding citizen in China,” it said.

Google was among 19 Internet companies singled out by the government on Monday, including China’s most popular search engine Baidu.

The sites were accused of spreading pornography and other material that could corrupt the young.

China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies announced a crackdown on companies that ignore government warnings and threatened to close down sites that did not comply.

Baidu and other targeted sites posted similarly worded apologies.

“We feel deep regret about (the government accusation) and we took immediate action to delete the relevant vulgar contents and links,” Baidu wrote.

China has the world’s largest online population at more that 250 million, according to official figures, and it is growing rapidly as computer use rises along with income levels.

China has launched a crackdown against major websites that officials accused of threatening morals by spreading pornography and vulgarity, including the dominant search engines Google and Baidu.

Reuters

China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies announced the campaign at a meeting on Monday, state television reported, showing officials hauling digital equipment away from one unidentified office.

The meeting “decided to launch a nationwide campaign to clean up a vulgar current on the Internet and named and exposed a large number of violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth and young people,” the report said.

The 19 Internet operators and websites named had failed to swiftly cut “vulgar” content and had not heeded warnings from censors, it said.

Baidu dominates the Chinese web search and advertising market with an estimated two-thirds of the audience. Google Inc, the global market leader, is a distant number two in China.